Reginald Dwayne Betts “Essay on Reentry”

Reginald Dwayne Betts holds a Ph.D. candidate in law at Yale. His main research interests are administrative law, criminal law, empirical legal studies, and law and literature. He received a BA from the University of Maryland and a JD from Yale Law School, where he received the Israel H. Perez Award for the best student note or comment in the Yale Law Journal. While running for JD, he spent his summers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia. In 2016-2017, he was a Liman Fellow working in the New Haven Public Defender's Office.

Before studying law, Dwayne was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies and a Soros Justice Fellow. Additionally, he was appointed as a practicing member of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by former President Barack Obama. The author of three books, Betts' latest collection of poems, Bastards of the Reagan Era, was named winner of the Pen New England Poetry Prize. His first collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Prize. Betts' memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction.

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